What Is Online Counseling, Exactly?

What I do has been called a variety of names, including online therapy, email therapy, virtual therapy, and cyber-counseling.  But, frankly, no matter what it’s called, it’s a powerful therapeutic tool that has the potential for helping people gain insight into and then resolve problems that interfere with the quality of their lives. I currently use email exchanges in my online counseling work.  I have used chat in the past but found that typing while simultaneously trying to think carefully about important issues is simply too difficult to do. 

Email exchanges offer clients time to reflect on what they’ve written to me and what I’ve said in my reply.  I’ve found that this inherent time delay, sometimes called "the zone of reflection", can be extremely helpful in working through thoughts and feelings. Just the process of writing down your thoughts and feelings can be very cathartic. Writing can lead to valuable personal insights, as those who advocate the use of journals have long believed. Clients tell me that, right from the start, writing to me about painful issues feels much easier than talking about the same issues face-to-face.  

Online counseling has a “liberating” or “disinhibiting” effect, in general.  We feel less inhibited when we write to someone who is a bit “anonymous,” so we feel safer and are therefore less likely to censor our thoughts.  Writing about our thoughts and feelings freely, without censorship, allows us to get to the root of our problems relatively quickly when compared to traditional face-to-face psychotherapy.  For more information about the pros and cons of online counseling, click here.

In online counseling, you can write to me as often as you like and your letters can be as long as you like -- you're free to do whatever feels helpful and comforting to you. Some clients supplement their letters to me with stories, poems, photographs, etc. – anything that can help me learn more about them.  That’s another advantage of online counseling -- you can set your own pace and aren’t forced to fit into the artificial structure of once-a-week 50-minute sessions that are a basic part of traditional psychotherapy.

Despite its convenience, ease, and low cost, doing online counseling is  NOT easy.  In many ways, it’s much more difficult than traditional therapy because you don't have non-verbal and body language cues to work with. You cannot watch your client behave. So it is usually more difficult than face-to-face counseling, despite the fact that it costs much less than seeing me face-to-face.

But, I believe that I have a special talent for doing online counseling. Perhaps this is related to the fact that I’ve been using writing as a therapeutic tool, both for myself, personally, and with my clients, for many years.  

For more information about online counseling, there is an excellent consumer guide to therapy and counseling using the internet at  www.metanoia.org.

Please note that I am a member of The International Society for Mental Health Online (www.ismho.org). This non-profit organization was formed in 1997 to "promote the understanding, use and development of online communication, information and technology for the international mental health community".